Prup

Prup is a small utility program that helps you deploy your code to your server in a single command.

Motivation

Having to connect to a server using SSH and pasting commands to pull from a git repository and build a project is cumbersome. Although tools helps you do that, they tend to be either heavy, hard to use or badly documented.

I wanted a small program to get the job done, have a very low memory footprint and could be easily configured / updated. Hence Prup, initially "PRoject UPdater".

How it works

Here's the general idea :

• You install prup on your server using NPM (yarn global add or volta install for example)
• You configure a project. A project simply is a location in your drive where your code lives. This is where the commands are going to be executed.
• You start a TCP Server, on port 17997. This server will listen to clients and execute commands if asked to. You have to start it manually. As a way to protect your server, a unique key is generated that must be provided by clients in order to be allowed to execute commands.
• Back to your local machine, you install prup and add your server as a remote. A remote contains information about a server that accepts prup requests. Informations are the IP Address, the port to which it listens to and the server secret key (without which you can't communicate with it).
• You create a prup.config.js file inside your code folder. It contains information about how prup should build your project.
• You can build your project whenever you want by typing prup build

Get Started

We will step by step walk through configure an hypothetical project.

On your server

First install prup on your server :

yarn global add prup

Now, add a project. We'll name it blog and assume it lives at /var/www/blog.

cd /var/www/blog && prup projects add blog

You can ensure it has been correctly added by typing prup projects list. Now that your project is created, you will see a list of commands to type in order to have it configured for your particular setup.

Start the prup server :

prup server start

We are now done with the server part.

On your local machine

Install prup globally :

yarn global add prup

Then add your server as a remote. We'll consider your server's IP address to be 1.2.3.4, the key 2e6e43d48eb9 and we will give it the name myServer.

prup remotes add myServer 1.2.3.4 17997 2e6e43d48eb9

You can ensure it has been correctly added by typing prup remotes list.

Now let's generate a prup.config.js file. Head into the code's directory.

cd /var/www/blog

And generate the file :

prup projects create-config myServer blog

It will contact the server, fetch informations about the project blog and create a prup.config.js file for you. It might look like this :

module.exports = {
  remoteAlias: "myServer",
  projectAlias: "blog",
  projectKey: "885a38cb7a127bf667c91273cb74cad764ebe2b77a",
  commands: [
    "git pull",
    "yarn run build",
    "php bin/console cache:clear",
  ]
};

Write your commands in the commands section. When you are done, simply run :

prup

It will execute the commands on your server, in the directory configured for your project blog.

You are done. Whenever you want to update your server's just run prup.

Most useful commands

Command	Side	Result
prup projects add <name> -d,--directory <directory>	Server	Add a project to prup
prup print-install-steps <name>	Server	Print a notice to help you configure the project on your local machine
prup server start	Server	Starts the server
prup server stop	Server	Stops the server
prup server info	Server	Print info about the server
prup	Client	Build the project
prup create-config <remote> <project>	Client	Create a prup.config.js file on your client' current working directory to build the project at remote
prup dump-config <remote> <project>	Client	Like create-config but writes it to standard output instead of creating the file
prup remotes list	Client	List all the remotes configured
prup remotes add <alias> <host> <port> <key>	Client	Add a remote. You should use prup print-install-steps <name> on your server to get started. Port is by default 17997.

Security

1. You shouldn't commit your prup.config.js file into your repository as it will expose your server.
2. Keep the keys secrets. Your server key allows anyone to communicate with the prup server and execute commands, so keep it safe.
3. Also keep your project keys secret. Each project has a key you need to use in order to build the project. Therefore you always need 2 keys to build a project.

I believe these are rudimentary security protections that will require more work to make prup even safer. PRs welcome ! In the meantime, you should really block communications to your port 17997 and whitelist your own machines. This port shouldn't be accessible publicly until we figure out how to make it safe with minimal intervention.

Next Steps

1. Whitelists / User Accounts : allow only specific machines to communicate with the server
2. Creating and configure projects remotely : without having to get into the server to add one.
3. Multiple commands : so you can separate build, clear and other tasks in separate command groups.
4. Multiple environments : one config file to deploy to multiple environments

Helping

This project is still prototypal and not ready for production use. Feedback and PRs are welcome !